Its no great secret that Juneau, a collection of features in the forthcoming SQL Server codenamed Denali, will be in the next version of Visual Studio but its nice to have it confirmed all the same. I have installed the first publicly available drop of that next version (known as Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, download from here) that was ...

In December 2010 I announced in a blog post Introducing SSIS Reporting Pack for SQL Server code-named Denali that I planned to provide a series of reports that visualised information held in the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server Denali – I called these reports the SSIS Reporting Pack. At that time SSIS Reporting Pack was a precursor to what I really ...

Over the last couple of months the SQL engineering team has been busy preparing SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3. As part of that effort, I have been driving the Beyond Relational scenario, that is adding some useful, cool and in some cases long awaited capabilities to SQL Server in the context of managing unstructured data and spatial data ...

In my blog post SSIS Server, Catalogs, Environments & Environment Variables in SSIS in Denali from November 2010 I alluded to forthcoming enhancements in the logging infrastructure when I said: One final note on logging. The fairly limited information that gets captured in the current CTP is not the same as what will be in the product upon ...

Reigniting the [SCDEndDate] debate In November 2009 I wrote a blog post entitled Debunking Kimball Effective Dates where I stated that I was against the Kimball-recommended practice of maintaining a StartDate & EndDate value for every record in a type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD) table (i.e. the values highlighted in blue in the ...

The third Community Technology Preview (CTP3) of SQL Server code-named Denali is upon us and, although you would never guess from the official announcement, there is a whole raft of enhancements to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and in this blog post I will take you on a tour of some of them. I must stress that nothing here is finalised ...

Tomorrow I shall be presenting a webinar entitled “New SSIS features and enhancements in Denali”. The webinar is being hosted by Pragmatic Works and you can sign up for it at Pragmatic Works webinars. The webinar will start at 1930BST and you can view the time for your timezone at this link: ...

You may have heard that the next version of SQL Server (code-named Denali) will include a new tool (code-named Juneau) that is intended to bring a first-class development experience for T-SQL developers. Juneau is not yet available for us, the general public, to try out so in an attempt to get some early feedback Microsoft have launched the “SQL ...

Introduction
Clem and Jim Bob were out hunting the other day in the woods south of Farmville. As they crossed a ridge, they came upon a big ol' Momma Bear and her cub. The larger bear immediately started towards them. Jim Bob took off running as fast as he could. He stopped when he realized Clem wasn't with him. And when he saw Clem reaching ...

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in its 2005 and 2008 incarnations expects you to set a property values within your package at runtime using Configurations. SSIS developers tend to have rather a lot of issues with SSIS configurations; in this blog post I am going to highlight one of those problems and how it has been alleviated in SQL Server ...